Honda, Corvette Win At Laguna Seca

Muscle Milk Pickett Racing got its second straight victory in the American Le Mans Series presented by Tequila Patrón on Saturday at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca.

In the GT class, Corvette Racing’s Oliver Gavin and Tommy Milner also took their second consecutive win.

Seven cars in the GT class were within two seconds in the closing hour with the Corvette fighting BMW Team RLL’s two BMW M3s and Porsche 911 GT3 RSRs from Flying Lizard Motorsports and Team Falken Tire.

Gavin made what turned out to be the winning pass in his Corvette C6.R on Team Falken Tire’s Wolf Henzler with a little less than hour left at the final turn. But the drama carried on for the next 60 minutes. Bill Auberlen in the No. 55 BMW M3 GT looked set to challenge Gavin for the race win before Jan Magnussen in the other Corvette muscled his way past the BMW with less than 15 minutes to go.

At the front of the field, Klaus Graf and Lucas Luhr dominated in their Honda Performance Development ARX-03a prototype. They duo trailed for less than a quarter of a lap after a strong start at the green flag by Dyson Racing. The Muscle Milk duo moved into the P1 championship lead with the victory.

Level 5 Motorsports is three-for-three on the season in P2 following a victory for Franck Montagny, Scott Tucker and Luis Diaz. Their HPD ARX-03b overcame a couple of penalties in pitlane and a wild day for each of the three cars that led the class.

The race-leading No. 055 crashed out just after it lost the lead – ironically with Montagny driving that car as well – and Conquest Racing suffered a late-race mechanical issue that took it out of contention. Its Morgan-Nissan of Martin Plowman, David Heinemeier Hansson and Antonio Pizzonia placed second in class.

CORE autosport won for the third straight Prototype Challenge race as well, but this time the No. 05 ORECA FLM09 of Colin Braun and Jon Bennett were class victors this time around. Braun passed RSR Racing’s Bruno Junqueira on the next-to-last lap as the two cars split a GT Challenge car on the last part of the lap.

Junqueira, Tomy Drissi and Roberto Gonzalez ended second with the other CORE entry of Alex Popow and Tom Kimber-Smith third. The top three cars were within 1.725 seconds.